Actually it can come worse.... I worked at a small software company back then, and the boss, bought a bunch of computers which had a combo of Via KT133A boards and Deskstar harddisks... The minute I saw this I warned him and told him to replace that part. He refused due to monetary reasons... The troubles this machines gave us were in the long run 10 times more expensive than buying the replacement parts and putting them into the machines...
None of the machines worked correctly, harddisks started to fail almost every week. The only two machines which ran correctly were the ones where I replaced the Deskstars with Maxtor harddisks and the Via boards with Sis based ones...
on the dreaded KT133A chipset which could never be stabilized, after burning through two such boards, and constantly having locks and IDE problems, I went for the a much cheaper SiS based board and suddenly that was the first Athlon board I ever owned which ran totally stable.
(and still does after almost four years and 3 processor upgrades)
Via is a no buy criterion for me everytime I see something from Via I try too look for other options.
Last time that was, was a few weeks ago, when I ditched my long term plans of waiting for Via to bring out a decent C3 combo and went for a Mac Mini purchase for my silent server needs.
I have a Radeon 9200 running in x.org... it is supported yes and it runs 3d... but the 3d code has several functions not implemented (the developers didnt get enough info from ati to implement them)
one of the main problems the drivers have in x.org is transparency which brings the composite extension to a crawl...
You can easily see that fire on tuxracer and watch the patterns tux makes in the snow, originally they rely heavily on transparency, due to the lack therof they dont work correctly.
Also simply fire up xcompmgr and use transset and watch the window crawl in a slideshow...
The problem is ATI delivers drivers but the are awful, they have the market share=developers philsophy thus windows gets most developers, and apple and Linux only get a handful (apple probably does most of the stuff in the ati drivers themselves or pays ati a lot to do the stuff properly) and thus systems like BSD are totally neglegted regarding binary builds...
Sure... but I know how to unzip a zipped file first before loading the XML part into notepad...
Given that I run a system with that nightmare of text editor.
Actually the choise of the Radeon 9200 was logical...
there are not too many decent graphic chips out there which can be passively cooled or dont even need a heatsink.
The main problem I see is, you dont have any chance either go with the 9200 or go with one of the mobiles, but if you go with the mobiles, face it, a heatsink is madatory and a fan maybe as well (those beasts can become quite hot in 3d mode)
Sure Apple could have gone for a 9700 mobile, but then they would have been unable to keep the size...
And I agree it is a very basic card (using one in my PC itself) but it is the best you can get without any cooling...
An Athlon64 will still such way more power than the apple one...
You cannot get a decent silent PC with low power consumption for less than 700... you can reach a 500 pricepoint if you go the mini itx route, but C3s suck, and if you go the cut down desktop route with a shuttle box, then you have a semi silent one, which still sucks a lot of power...
But I agress cool&quiet is the right direction AMD did, but once you put a little bit of load onto such a machine the noise will kill you, constant load and the power consumption will kill ya too.
Besides that the move from 16 to 32 bit had other motivations.
First win95 was the first windows with a good gui, the move to 32 bit finally brought a plain memory model instead of the hated segments.
The next problem was that programming against x86 16 bit systems was god awful and nobody really wanted to do it because you constantly ran into the segmentation barriers etc...
The current situation is totally different, there wont be any really big 64 bit impact on the client side before 2010, and before that it is no big deal to do multi platform compiles, after all we are not talking about having to change lots of code for the upgrade from 32 to 64 bit (the mem issue is does not exist currently and people usually dont use data type boundary tricks anymore to save a few processing cycles)
Expect that at least the next 4-5 years you will get 32 bit versions of anything...
Even Windows64 on the AMD/Intel side is sort of problematic and probably will only be serviced as a sideoffer (64 bit OSes usually carry a 32 bit thunking layer around)
The reason why the move from 16 bit to 32 bit was carried out so swiftly back in the early nineties was. Because programs ran into the 16 bit barriers left and right and every developer hoped that he could move to 32 bit in an instant, add to that the fact that the consumer mass market happened way after the switch to 32 bit, and even then a 16 bit thunking layer was needed at least for 3 years.
The situation nowadays is totally different. 64 Bit windows is still in unstable mode, Linux is there but some problems still are problematic, there is no actual need for the programmers to have 64 bit, because the mem boundary will not be reached for another 5 years and there is a huge market of old 32 bit systems which wont be phased out before 2010, so dont expect any serious abandoning of the 32 bit systems before 2010-2012.
There is more marketing into 64 bit than any sanity on the client side of things. Servers are a different game though...
But I admit the marketing of AMD hit intel on the ignorance side... And one thing finally AMD fixed which Intel should have fixed in the mid eighties, they finally added more general purpose registers, which will help VMs and compilers tremendously.
Well many mac users cope with it pretty well, but most of them simply dont know that a normal 2-3 button mouse works well on a mac.
But most macians I know simply plug another mouse on their mac, they simply hate the one button mouse...
There were lots of computers with a similar formfactor way before the mini...
The whole thing is called silent pc/sff pc...
The only difference is, Apple did beat any of those in the price/performance ratio (there are slightly cheaper ones based on really slow G3s all the others are significantly more expensive)
The funny thing is for the first time since the Apple2 apple has brought out a machine which is the best and one of the cheapest of its kind.
I am sure we will see Centrino based small ones in the 600 USD range in about half a year or a year, but until then Apple has sort of a monopoly in this game.
Ah another clueless customer...
Do you have one machine with more than 4 Gigs of ram? If no... there is only one single reason on x86 to go the 64bit route, you get more than a measly handful of general purpose registers. The x86-32 bit architecture is one of the worst architectures there is register wise, AMD64 eased that problem to a certain degree given that the iron runs in 64 bit mode.
Guess what, the PowerPC, even the sort of predecessor the 68000 already had a lot of general purpose registers from the beginning.
So do you need more than 4 gig of ram? No? then why do you want to go the 64 bit route on PPC?
Guess what, you just fell into AMDs marketing hype...
Yes and no given that it was the Rational Atlantic launch event, it was sales people but from the technical side mostly (most of them had majors in CS).
I can remember having those guys start VMWare left and right with Windows in it to demonstrate some of the features.
The whole presentation was on Windows with VMware starting one or two additional Windows instances...
This machine is built to stand free so that the internal vent can work.
The problem I see with it in a rack is heat issues.
Sure you can use the Mac as a home server within a home, a homeserver hosts some services (fileservices sometimes movies and mp3s) and stands free, it is just there 90% of the time and 10% of the time it has real work to do.
The problems start if you put that stuff into a rack that once it has work to do it needs a good ventilation where air is sucked in from the bottom like most notebooks do, so it works in a home environemt but easily might burn out in a rack....
There are various options, USB2.0 is fast enough to handle GBit Ethernet to a big degree (not fully probably but fast enough) then there is IP over firewire which is also very fast...
Ahh the good ole GHz myth... Actually the Mac mini pretty much is in the same performance league as modern Centrino notebooks without the dreaded shared memory graphics adapter and a Radeon 9200 in it, so it is not top of the league but definitely pretty much the same league as current Wintel notebooks (somewhere between Centrino Shared Mem and Centrino with Radeion 9700 mobile)
A high GHz number only is one sure indicator, that you get another room heating system, there are even on the Wintel side of things processors which reach at 1.4 GHz around the speed of a P4 with 2.5 GHz and the G4 is in the same league, I would call that fast enough for most modern home purposes including Mpeg4, DVD play and DiVX....
Sony has made more than one mistake in the past. I know several people who really could afford anything who bought basically Sony only but will never buy Sony for the forseeable future.
The reasons are various. First of all, thanks to Sony Media lots of their stuff is crippled, Region Codes which are hardest to remove from any manufacturer, no decent two way transport of media files in almost any of their devices. The obscure Atrac conversion in their MP3 players, lousy quality of their PCs and add to that at least here in Europe one of the worst customer services ever in existence, combined with repair costs which are higher than a new device from another company, and you can see why Sony has a bigger problem than they admit on their hands.
Also add to that that their retailers are totally frustrated because, they were taken away the support business (which was done in the past by the retailers themselves in many cases) and the profit margins even of the high end devices are close to zero, driving the smaller shops away from Sony.
The Support problem started when Sony centralized all support, before Sony had this kind of luxury structure Apple still has with small shops who do all the small stuff and have good personal, Sony wanted it big and basically drove those shops away trying to cash in on a centralized structure. Add to that constant problems caused by Sony media which resulted in catastrophicly castrated devices and lots of problems which often caused Sony hardware to fail shortly after the warranty expired and you have a huge mess on its hand.
The playstation basically saved the Sony hardware division without it this division would have made huge losses already.
Sony really has a problem, but it is far bigger than only a few mp3 player models which they have missed out.
The civil war trolls have been around since shortly before the elections (mostly on the internet, given that I dont have access to Fox news I wonder if the origins are there). If you look at civil war conditions then you can see that the USA is generally still miles away from that.
Russia not even is close to that anymore (but it was very close around 1999 I have to admit)
There are many things which have to happen before people go to arms.
The US civil war of the 19th century was more a political war
between to separate countries (the already were divided before hell broke loose and generally wars were started very swiftly back then, because usually they did not last longer than one or two battles (with exceptions of course)),
same the balkans war which would not have been that intense if there were not several high ranked people who wanted to have this war going on literally forever. Under the current conditions I would not even see a civil war in the US over a splitup of the country (the living standard is still high, there is nobody except a few nutcracks who think that the government has to be fought with arms, although the government is lousy).
If thing really go down the drain then the conditions might be there, but even a major economic crisis only is under certain circumstances a reason for a civil war.
I would recommend something about learning history before talking about brink of a civil war.
History has a tendency to repeat itself over and over because people refuse to learn from it.
The only reason I could see for a major civil war in the US is a government basically having run into something absolute in combination with a major crisis and oppression.
But there still is a long way...
Ditch proprietary formats also on the hardware side.
Bring back the good support you once had (European support is awful)
Dont build machines which break down 2 days after the warranty expires and then charge huge sums for repair.
And stop being assholes generally...
The problem with the US is that the US basically does not really produce anything anymore, except food, weapons and movies.
The rest is outsourced and only has become a brand.
Add to that that Bush basically cut back on coporate taxes and you can see where the crisis comes from.
Even if you buy US goods, the money definitely wont help the US economy as I see it.
America is not on the brink of a civil war...
Things are totally exaggerated, but the current administration should really get their act together bugdetwise instead of smearing fud (pension funds etc....) otherwise there might be a major economic crisis...
Actually Canon is not too bad, you can remove the printhead out with a snap. Although the heads are expensive Canon is quite good with selling you heads for really old models.
Most if the clogging you can remove by putting that thing overnight into a small amount of pure alcohol or distilled water...
Cano
Slashdot Mirror
Tony Tough is, The Westerner also...
Actually it can come worse.... I worked at a small software company back then, and the boss, bought a bunch of computers which had a combo of Via KT133A boards and Deskstar harddisks... The minute I saw this I warned him and told him to replace that part. He refused due to monetary reasons... The troubles this machines gave us were in the long run 10 times more expensive than buying the replacement parts and putting them into the machines... None of the machines worked correctly, harddisks started to fail almost every week. The only two machines which ran correctly were the ones where I replaced the Deskstars with Maxtor harddisks and the Via boards with Sis based ones...
on the dreaded KT133A chipset which could never be stabilized, after burning through two such boards, and constantly having locks and IDE problems, I went for the a much cheaper SiS based board and suddenly that was the first Athlon board I ever owned which ran totally stable. (and still does after almost four years and 3 processor upgrades)
Via is a no buy criterion for me everytime I see something from Via I try too look for other options. Last time that was, was a few weeks ago, when I ditched my long term plans of waiting for Via to bring out a decent C3 combo and went for a Mac Mini purchase for my silent server needs.
I have a Radeon 9200 running in x.org... it is supported yes and it runs 3d... but the 3d code has several functions not implemented (the developers didnt get enough info from ati to implement them) one of the main problems the drivers have in x.org is transparency which brings the composite extension to a crawl... You can easily see that fire on tuxracer and watch the patterns tux makes in the snow, originally they rely heavily on transparency, due to the lack therof they dont work correctly. Also simply fire up xcompmgr and use transset and watch the window crawl in a slideshow... The problem is ATI delivers drivers but the are awful, they have the market share=developers philsophy thus windows gets most developers, and apple and Linux only get a handful (apple probably does most of the stuff in the ati drivers themselves or pays ati a lot to do the stuff properly) and thus systems like BSD are totally neglegted regarding binary builds...
Given that even the fastest C3 currently in existence is much slower than the G4...
Sure... but I know how to unzip a zipped file first before loading the XML part into notepad... Given that I run a system with that nightmare of text editor.
Actually the choise of the Radeon 9200 was logical... there are not too many decent graphic chips out there which can be passively cooled or dont even need a heatsink. The main problem I see is, you dont have any chance either go with the 9200 or go with one of the mobiles, but if you go with the mobiles, face it, a heatsink is madatory and a fan maybe as well (those beasts can become quite hot in 3d mode) Sure Apple could have gone for a 9700 mobile, but then they would have been unable to keep the size... And I agree it is a very basic card (using one in my PC itself) but it is the best you can get without any cooling...
An Athlon64 will still such way more power than the apple one... You cannot get a decent silent PC with low power consumption for less than 700... you can reach a 500 pricepoint if you go the mini itx route, but C3s suck, and if you go the cut down desktop route with a shuttle box, then you have a semi silent one, which still sucks a lot of power... But I agress cool&quiet is the right direction AMD did, but once you put a little bit of load onto such a machine the noise will kill you, constant load and the power consumption will kill ya too.
Besides that the move from 16 to 32 bit had other motivations. First win95 was the first windows with a good gui, the move to 32 bit finally brought a plain memory model instead of the hated segments. The next problem was that programming against x86 16 bit systems was god awful and nobody really wanted to do it because you constantly ran into the segmentation barriers etc... The current situation is totally different, there wont be any really big 64 bit impact on the client side before 2010, and before that it is no big deal to do multi platform compiles, after all we are not talking about having to change lots of code for the upgrade from 32 to 64 bit (the mem issue is does not exist currently and people usually dont use data type boundary tricks anymore to save a few processing cycles)
Expect that at least the next 4-5 years you will get 32 bit versions of anything... Even Windows64 on the AMD/Intel side is sort of problematic and probably will only be serviced as a sideoffer (64 bit OSes usually carry a 32 bit thunking layer around)
The reason why the move from 16 bit to 32 bit was carried out so swiftly back in the early nineties was. Because programs ran into the 16 bit barriers left and right and every developer hoped that he could move to 32 bit in an instant, add to that the fact that the consumer mass market happened way after the switch to 32 bit, and even then a 16 bit thunking layer was needed at least for 3 years.
The situation nowadays is totally different. 64 Bit windows is still in unstable mode, Linux is there but some problems still are problematic, there is no actual need for the programmers to have 64 bit, because the mem boundary will not be reached for another 5 years and there is a huge market of old 32 bit systems which wont be phased out before 2010, so dont expect any serious abandoning of the 32 bit systems before 2010-2012. There is more marketing into 64 bit than any sanity on the client side of things. Servers are a different game though... But I admit the marketing of AMD hit intel on the ignorance side... And one thing finally AMD fixed which Intel should have fixed in the mid eighties, they finally added more general purpose registers, which will help VMs and compilers tremendously.
Well many mac users cope with it pretty well, but most of them simply dont know that a normal 2-3 button mouse works well on a mac. But most macians I know simply plug another mouse on their mac, they simply hate the one button mouse...
There were lots of computers with a similar formfactor way before the mini... The whole thing is called silent pc/sff pc... The only difference is, Apple did beat any of those in the price/performance ratio (there are slightly cheaper ones based on really slow G3s all the others are significantly more expensive)
The funny thing is for the first time since the Apple2 apple has brought out a machine which is the best and one of the cheapest of its kind.
I am sure we will see Centrino based small ones in the 600 USD range in about half a year or a year, but until then Apple has sort of a monopoly in this game.
Ah another clueless customer... Do you have one machine with more than 4 Gigs of ram? If no... there is only one single reason on x86 to go the 64bit route, you get more than a measly handful of general purpose registers. The x86-32 bit architecture is one of the worst architectures there is register wise, AMD64 eased that problem to a certain degree given that the iron runs in 64 bit mode.
Guess what, the PowerPC, even the sort of predecessor the 68000 already had a lot of general purpose registers from the beginning. So do you need more than 4 gig of ram? No? then why do you want to go the 64 bit route on PPC?
Guess what, you just fell into AMDs marketing hype...
Yes and no given that it was the Rational Atlantic launch event, it was sales people but from the technical side mostly (most of them had majors in CS). I can remember having those guys start VMWare left and right with Windows in it to demonstrate some of the features. The whole presentation was on Windows with VMware starting one or two additional Windows instances...
This machine is built to stand free so that the internal vent can work. The problem I see with it in a rack is heat issues. Sure you can use the Mac as a home server within a home, a homeserver hosts some services (fileservices sometimes movies and mp3s) and stands free, it is just there 90% of the time and 10% of the time it has real work to do. The problems start if you put that stuff into a rack that once it has work to do it needs a good ventilation where air is sucked in from the bottom like most notebooks do, so it works in a home environemt but easily might burn out in a rack....
There are various options, USB2.0 is fast enough to handle GBit Ethernet to a big degree (not fully probably but fast enough) then there is IP over firewire which is also very fast...
at a presentation.... what struck me was that they used Windows left and right on the clients... I still had the announcement in mind...
Ahh the good ole GHz myth... Actually the Mac mini pretty much is in the same performance league as modern Centrino notebooks without the dreaded shared memory graphics adapter and a Radeon 9200 in it, so it is not top of the league but definitely pretty much the same league as current Wintel notebooks (somewhere between Centrino Shared Mem and Centrino with Radeion 9700 mobile) A high GHz number only is one sure indicator, that you get another room heating system, there are even on the Wintel side of things processors which reach at 1.4 GHz around the speed of a P4 with 2.5 GHz and the G4 is in the same league, I would call that fast enough for most modern home purposes including Mpeg4, DVD play and DiVX....
Sony has made more than one mistake in the past. I know several people who really could afford anything who bought basically Sony only but will never buy Sony for the forseeable future.
The reasons are various. First of all, thanks to Sony Media lots of their stuff is crippled, Region Codes which are hardest to remove from any manufacturer, no decent two way transport of media files in almost any of their devices. The obscure Atrac conversion in their MP3 players, lousy quality of their PCs and add to that at least here in Europe one of the worst customer services ever in existence, combined with repair costs which are higher than a new device from another company, and you can see why Sony has a bigger problem than they admit on their hands.
Also add to that that their retailers are totally frustrated because, they were taken away the support business (which was done in the past by the retailers themselves in many cases) and the profit margins even of the high end devices are close to zero, driving the smaller shops away from Sony.
The Support problem started when Sony centralized all support, before Sony had this kind of luxury structure Apple still has with small shops who do all the small stuff and have good personal, Sony wanted it big and basically drove those shops away trying to cash in on a centralized structure. Add to that constant problems caused by Sony media which resulted in catastrophicly castrated devices and lots of problems which often caused Sony hardware to fail shortly after the warranty expired and you have a huge mess on its hand.
The playstation basically saved the Sony hardware division without it this division would have made huge losses already. Sony really has a problem, but it is far bigger than only a few mp3 player models which they have missed out.
So much for being more readable...
The civil war trolls have been around since shortly before the elections (mostly on the internet, given that I dont have access to Fox news I wonder if the origins are there). If you look at civil war conditions then you can see that the USA is generally still miles away from that. Russia not even is close to that anymore (but it was very close around 1999 I have to admit) There are many things which have to happen before people go to arms. The US civil war of the 19th century was more a political war between to separate countries (the already were divided before hell broke loose and generally wars were started very swiftly back then, because usually they did not last longer than one or two battles (with exceptions of course)), same the balkans war which would not have been that intense if there were not several high ranked people who wanted to have this war going on literally forever. Under the current conditions I would not even see a civil war in the US over a splitup of the country (the living standard is still high, there is nobody except a few nutcracks who think that the government has to be fought with arms, although the government is lousy). If thing really go down the drain then the conditions might be there, but even a major economic crisis only is under certain circumstances a reason for a civil war. I would recommend something about learning history before talking about brink of a civil war. History has a tendency to repeat itself over and over because people refuse to learn from it. The only reason I could see for a major civil war in the US is a government basically having run into something absolute in combination with a major crisis and oppression.
But there still is a long way... Ditch proprietary formats also on the hardware side. Bring back the good support you once had (European support is awful) Dont build machines which break down 2 days after the warranty expires and then charge huge sums for repair. And stop being assholes generally...
The problem with the US is that the US basically does not really produce anything anymore, except food, weapons and movies. The rest is outsourced and only has become a brand. Add to that that Bush basically cut back on coporate taxes and you can see where the crisis comes from. Even if you buy US goods, the money definitely wont help the US economy as I see it.
America is not on the brink of a civil war... Things are totally exaggerated, but the current administration should really get their act together bugdetwise instead of smearing fud (pension funds etc....) otherwise there might be a major economic crisis...
Actually Canon is not too bad, you can remove the printhead out with a snap. Although the heads are expensive Canon is quite good with selling you heads for really old models. Most if the clogging you can remove by putting that thing overnight into a small amount of pure alcohol or distilled water... Cano